Elizabeth Dias & Lisa Lerer, “The Fall of Roe” Flatiron Books, 2024, 396 pp.

Below is an edited NYT Review:  THE FALL OF ROE: The Rise of a New America, by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer

The authors present both sides of the abortion issue along with the history of each side throughout this book.  I found this chronological presentation of both sides to be the main attraction to me of this book.

The authors detail the conversion of Marjorie Dannenfelser, who found Catholicism in college, renounced her support of abortion rights, and went on to run one of the most prominent anti-abortion organizations in America.

At several points, they return to the trauma that strengthened the conservative activist Leonard Leo’s resolve to defeat Roe: His eldest child, Margaret, was diagnosed in utero with a severe form of spina bifida, and died when she was 14.

In the chapter that recounts the 13-hour filibuster that the then Texas state senator Wendy Davis undertook to halt a restrictive 2013 abortion bill, Dias and Lerer tell of Davis’s decision to terminate a desperately wanted pregnancy after a devastating diagnosis.

Tracking Abortion Bans Across the Country

The New York Times is tracking the status of abortion laws in each state following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

 

“The Fall of Roe” revisits some well-trod material: the fracas over the Supreme Court seat that sat vacant after the death of Antonin Scalia; the 2016 presidential race.  But it’s a credit to the writers that “The Fall of Roe” makes even familiar revelations sting anew. While it is no secret that Democrats were ill-prepared for the anti-abortion offensive, the rage of Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic representative from Michigan, feels fresh even today. “In 50 years of Roe being on the books as legal precedent, we had never codified it in law,” she stormed. “The other side for 50 years has had a legal strategy — where is our 50-year strategy?”

After Dobbs, the owner of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Mississippi sold the building, known to its supporters as the Pink House, and reconstructed it in New Mexico. Diane Derzis christened her new clinic Pink House West. From her perch in a relatively reliable haven for abortion access, Derzis watched as Dobbs spurred a cascade of abortion rights victories.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade was credited with securing the best midterm results for the party of a sitting president in two decades. In all seven states in which abortion access has been put to a direct vote since it has won. In November 2024, more states will vote on their referendums; several are expected to succeed.

Dias and Lerer write that in a private call, Marjorie Dannenfelser’s organization counseled lawmakers in Tennessee to wait a session or two before introducing bills that would regulate I.V.F. and contraception — but the movement seems uninterested in their marching orders. In 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children and people could therefore be held liable for destroying them. The decision forced fertility clinics in the state to halt their work and barred families from accessing their own genetic material. Just after the midterm elections in 2022, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit to compel the F.D.A. to revoke its decades-old approval of one of the two pills that initiate a medication abortion.

My Notes:

Pg. 11:  2012 marked the first time in American history that white Christians—evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics—became a minority in America, falling to just below 50 percent of the adult population.  In 1992, white Christians were almost two-thirds of the country, a demographic supermajority. 

Pg. 12:  Beginning in 1973 a woman in America had the right to get an abortion until a fetus could live separately—a point the court called viability—which at the time was about twenty-eight weeks into pregnancy. (Attacking this viability concept became the target for anti-abortionists for the next 49 years; by 2016 nearly a third of states had twenty-week bans).

Pg. 82f:  In 1960 the FDA approved the birth control pill.  Five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that married couples had a right to contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut.  This case grew out of the arrest of Estelle Griswold, the executive director of Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, who was violating state law by distributing contraception to married women.  And in 1970, legislation creating Title X, the program that contributed millions of federal dollars to Planned Parenthood to help fund contraception, cancer screening, and other types of women’s health services, passed with bipartisan support, and was signed into law by Nixon.  In 1972 the decision in Eisenstadt v. Barid created a right for single people to access contraception.

Pg. 113:  For centuries, the Catholic church taught that the soul entered the fetus only later in pregnancy, but in 1869, as the scientific revolution took hold, the church decreed that human life begins at conception and expressly forbade abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

Pg. 132:  IVF was just starting to become mainstream in the 1980s.  But the Catholic Church strictly opposed IVF and most fertility treatments.  The problem the church taught, was that fertility treatments substituted for sexual intercourse, which it believed to be the expression of the sacrament of marriage.  Pope Benedict XVI linked the IVF procedure to abortion. 

Pg. 143:  Eighty-one percent of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump in 2016. 

Pg. 279:  The Trump administration transformed the judiciary, shifting power toward opponents of abortion for a generation.  Trump appointed nearly 230 judges to the federal bench, just one fewer powerful federal appeals court judges in four years than Obama appointed in eight, and three judges to the Supreme Court.

Pg. 284:  Leonard Leo quietly took control of one of the largest pools of political money in American history, with help from a secret $1.6 billion donation from a little-known conservative donor, Barre Seid.  Now, at ninety, he had entrusted his legacy to Leo through transactions over a two-year period that allowed him to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. 

Pg. 317:  Texas passed a law, SB 8, which included an unconventional mechanism to circumvent Roe by giving the power of enforcement not to state officials but to ordinary citizens.  It created a new class of citizen-policers who would sue people they believed might have helped a woman get an abortion—anyone from doctors and clinic leaders to Uber drivers who transported a woman to her appointment.  Anyone inside or outside of Texas could become a potential bounty hunter and get a $10,000 reward if they win their lawsuit.  The only people whom the law protected were the abortion patients themselves, who could not be sued. 

Pg. 344f:  There had been leaks before the Dobbs leak.  On July 4, 1972, six months before the Roe decision was released, the Washington Post published a story about the court’s internal deliberations.  It detailed a memo from Justice Douglas to his colleagues describing what he saw as Chief Justice Burger’s improper power plays to try to delay a decision until Nixon could fill two vacancies on the court. 

Pg. 350:  Roe fell on June 24, 2022. “Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.  Roe and Casey are overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”  (Note: Roe fell on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.)

Pg. 374:  The reality was that Roe did not just fall once, on June 24, 2022.  Roe collapsed over a transformational decade.  Roe fell when Texas enacted its near-total abortion ban and turned neighbors into citizen law enforcers.  It fell when Ginsburg died and Amy Barret took her place.  It fell when the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh.  When Jane Doe was initially denied an abortion.  When Mike Pence worked to craft the Trump administration in his image.  When Trump was elected president.  When Mississippi had just a single abortion clinic. 

Pg. 380:  Even with Democratic control of the Senate, Biden was limited in what he could do.  In the months after Dobbs, Congress codified protection for same-sex marriage and interracial marriage into federal law, but Democrats could not get the votes to do the same for abortion rights. 

Pg. 384:  A decision of the Supreme Court, once made, nearly always stands.  Less than 1 percent of the court’s more than twenty-five thousand decisions have ever been expressly reversed since the founding of America.  

Addenda:  The Catholic church did not condemn abortion until 1869 during the reign of Pius IX, the same Pope who declared infallibility.